because people who like their living green and private don’t usually appreciate a lot of fluttering flags and cartwheeling clowns.

Negativland, Escape from Noise

Puddingtime is now reopen for business in radically simplified form. Some plumbing remains unported, but the place is habitable.

Things that are still broken include

the full content RSS feed

the “Mac Free” RSS feed

the “On This Day” feature

any sane redirect scheme from the old pages, which still reside in /archives and which will receive one more rebuild once I strip them down so they aren’t loaded with stuff that will rot over time.

Things that are new:

TypeKey is enabled, but toothless: No one’s being kept from posting, it’s more of a convenience for people who have TypeKey identities and would like to use them. Everyone else can continue to skulk around here in savage, naked splendor. Sidenote for people interested in implementing TypeKey in their own MT 3 blogs: When they ask for the URL of the site where you want to use your TypeKey Token, they want the path to the cgi’s… not the site’s URL.

Things that will be coming as I get around to making them so:

Markdown in the comments, because Markdown is pleasant.

Not much else. Remember all that fussing I did about workflow and process management? This is more of that, with the applied lesson from all that fretting being “simplify where possible.”

I’ve visited there before, but it was good to go back and see those pages this evening as I sat in front of the computer jiggering things around: The old cstone pages were put together with Emacs and produced using a perl script called genpage. They weren’t very fancy because I had no idea how to do anything fancy consistently, and because I was a lot more interested in being able to publish, not design.

It’s easy to rhapsodize about the democratizing power of the Internet. It puts the power to “publish” in the hands of anyone with access to modest computing resources. It’s easy, in a place and times of plenty, to overlook that it’s generally a relative elite taking advantage of this power.

Even so, the Internet has created interesting permutations in the way we communicate with each other. Weblogs form another variation in the personal page, breathing new life into something that was getting remarkably tired for being less than a decade old. They aren’t an answer to the traditional media, because they tend to feed off the traditional media. On the other hand, they hint of a future based around personalized, trust-based networks standing in opposition to the shaky, authority-based, profit-motivated news channels we live with now.

There’s also an essay on Linux in there somewhere.

Both subjects have something in common: At some point the people in orbit around these things became aware of themselves as a community, so they started talking about themselves, and it became important to be a voice in those communities. Then the little ponytail guys turned up and did their damndest to turn it all to a big goldmine, with the attendant piles of dirt and leavings in the form of trashy, forgettable books, pompous titles, and phony “leaders.”

A friend of mine reminded me once that you can’t let those people ruin things for you. You should always take the time to point and laugh while they elbow for positions around the trough, but you should never, ever let them take the joy out of anything.